The Funny & Weird Ways We See New Technologies
When new technologies come along, we get some really funny and weird ideas about what they’ll do to us. A fun look at some.
The men and women on the platform moved around nervously. Some a bit agitated. A peculiar vibration hung in the air. As the train approached, one man pulled his wife back, talking to her urgently. An article in the paper had come out last night. It warned that women who took a train might have their uteruses fall out. And that bodies would melt on these fast new steam trains. Or that cows would stop producing milk if they saw trains go by.
While that may seem a bit quirky and funny today, that was one of the ways society reacted to railway trains in the late 19th century. Throughout history, we’ve had some rather odd, sometimes funny, and at other times bizarre, ways of reacting to new technologies entering our societies.
Even as far back as 370 BC, Socrates feared that writing might create “forgetfulness in learners’ souls” as it would mean people would no longer remember things. More recently, author Nicholas Carr wrote that “Google will make us stoopid.”
Why do we react this way to new technologies? If it seems we’re reacting even more to new technologies today, you’d be right to think that and there’s a very good reason why. And it rarely has anything at all to…
